Greta Garbo's Movies Get the TV Guide Treatment: "As You Desire Me" and "The Painted Veil"

Above: Hollywood veterans Herbert Marshall and Greta Garbo, standing on a sound stage and pretending to look at fascinating and highly entertaining dances done by the locals in a film about British colonial rule not being so terribly bad somehow. More on that later.

My two-week vacation break is over and now we can continue with this summer series on Greta Garbo films. Each week I've been summarizing a film or films, loosely in the style of TV Guide. If you would like to start at the beginning of this series, you can go here. Before this series, there was a two-part post giving the source for each of Garbo's films. To see that, please go here.

It makes sense, I think, to do a couple of Garbo's movies out of order, because "Queen Christina," which was originally released between the two films we're reviewing today, is epic and needs its own stand-alone post.

Let's kick this week off with "As You Desire Me." That's the movie in which Garbo is a peroxide blonde.

Here's a video clip with Garbo demonstrating that blondes really do have more fun:

The film was adapted from Luigi Piranello's play "Come Tu Mi Vuoi" ("How You Love Me") After "As You Desire Me" was released in 1934, Pirandello's publishers went back and re-titled the play itself as a movie tie-in.

The plot for this film would have worked for an American daytime soap opera. Zara, an entertainer with a drinking problem, lives in Budapest with her lover, Carl. Then a stranger named Tony shows up to claim that Zara is an amnesiac who is actually Maria, who has a husband she left behind ten years ago. Tony is friends with the abandoned husband, whose name is Bruno, and he talks Zara into leaving with him.

Carl, Zara's boyfriend, is a writer who lives in a pretty nice place, but Bruno, who believes Zara is actually his wife Maria, has a really nice house on a big property. Bruno keeps trying to get Zara to remember back when she was Maria, but no one -- Tony, Bruno, nor Zara -- is sure whether Zara is really Maria. Then Carl, Zara's original boyfriend, comes by with a woman who obviously has something going on with her mentally, and Carl says this new woman is the real Maria. We as viewers, by this point, are asking ourselves "Who knows? Who cares?"

In summary, Pirandello's play isn't very good and it couldn't be made into much of a movie. So let's leave the movie in which Garbo's hair has been bleached peroxide white and look at the movie in which Garbo famously wears a white turban: "The Painted Veil."

Just by looking at the movie poster, we note beautiful white woman at the top, two powerful white men in the middle, and a lot of almost-inhuman-lookjing people of color at the bottom. Is this a film set in the time of a far-ranging British Empire in which "civilized" Europeans come to others' homelands to manage their lives for them? Why yes, yes it is.

Here's the video clip from which the stills at the top of this post were taken:

The story: Katrin, the lonely daughter of an Austian medical researcher, marries Dr. Fane, who studies bacteria, because that way she can move somewhere interesting and see more of life. In this case, it's life in Hong Kong. As seems to happen to Greta Garbo in every other movie, her character's husband wants her till he marries her, then he gets busy doing something else. In this case, studying bacteria. Meanwhile a handsome diplomat notices that Mrs. Kane is hanging around in Hong Kong, bored out of her gourd, and you'll never guess what happens.

Okay, you guessed. The diplomat spends time with Katrin and they go watch exotic dancing which revs them up and there is kissing. Katrin, in the meantime, has complained to her husband that he comes home too late from the bacteriology lab, so he comes home to find a diplomat's hat on the hall table and his wife's bedroom door locked.

Dr. Kane's pretty nice about it. He doesn't make a scene, but later that night he gets his wife to admit that she wants the diplomat, and Kane is concerned that since the diplomat is married, things might not work out so well for Katrin. He says he'll give her a divorce, but only if the diplomat will give Katrin his written promise to divorce his own wife. And I am sure you're thinking the lovesick diplomat will do that immediately.

Surprise! No, he's a cad. Dr. Kane suggests that his wife come along with him on a medical trip, to take her mind off her heartbreak. They travel deep into China, where cholera is out of control. Katrin, who was bummed out before, is not REALLY depressed. Dr. Kane, who is noble, sees that his wife is wretched and says he'll send her back to Hong Kong while he stays and tries to stop the cholera outbreak. Katrin tells him that she's touched by his kindness and she's sorry she fooled around with the handsome diplomat, and off she goes away from death and disease.

Dr. Kane, once he's on his own, realizes that there's one toxic village on the river where all the cholera germs are, and arranges to have the whole dman thing set on fire. He knows this is a great idea, bacteriologically speaking, but the local people see it as having their village burned to the ground and someone stabs the doctor during a riot.

Meanwhile, it turns out that repentant Katrin did not go back to Hong Kong, but instead has begun to volunteer at an orphanage for children whose parents died of cholera. But when she gets word that Dr. Kane has been stabbed, she rushes to the hospital to see him. But guess who's also at the hsopital? That cad, the diplomat who wouldn't write Katrin his promise to get a divorce because he thought it would mess up his career. Katrin tells him that she does not love his cad self, and that she loves her good husband, who burns down peoples' houses -- I mean, who stops the cholera outbreak and got knifed for his efforts. The miffed diplomat leaves, and Katrin goes to her wounded husband's bedside to give him the good word.

Note 1:

The stage version of "As You Desire Me" appeared in 1930, and in 1932, a song with the same title hit the radio airwaves.